Best practices with Nuget: Debug or Release?

Question

Currently, I package the release builds with Nuget for the official builds to nuget.org, but I package the debug builds with Nuget for the symbol source pushes to symbolsour

Answer 1

Speaking for SymbolSource, I believe that the best practice is to:

1. Push release binary+content packages to nuget.org only (or any other production feed)
2. Push debug binary+content packages to a development feed:
   • on-premise
   • on myget.org
   • on nuget.org as pre-release packages.
3. Push both release and debug binary+symbols packages to symbolsource.org or any other symbol store.

While we're at it, it is a common misconception that release and debug builds in .NET really differ much, but I am assuming that the differentiation is here because of various code that might or might not be included in either build, like Debug.Asserts.

That said, it is really worth pushing both configurations to SymbolSource, because you just never know when you're going to need to debug production code. Remotely in production to make it harder. You're going to need the help you can get from your tooling when that happens. Which I obviously do not wish upon anyone.

There is still a matter to consider regarding versioning: is it correct to have 2 different packages (build in debug and in release) sharing 1 version number? SymbolSource would accept that, because it extracts packages and stores binaries in separate build mode branches, IF ONLY NuGet allowed to tag packages accordingly. There is no way at present to determine if a package is debug or release-mode.